Humanitas Secures Seed Funding – Furthers Mission to Counteract Increasingly Biased and Inaccurate Algorithms

By PR Newswire On May 19, 2022

Humanitas Technologies, the impact data infrastructure startup that is building a universal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) API or “Grammarly for DEI”, officially announces they’ve secured $1.5M in seed funding. Strategic investors include Francoise Brougher, Jeff Walker, Mark Tercek, and founders and executives from FiscalNote, Mammoth Biosciences, Cymantix, Google AI, Expedia, Meta, and more.

The funds will enable Humanitas to expand engineering capacities to continue building upon its mission of counteracting an increasingly sexist and racist internet.

“By unlocking frontline socioeconomic data, we’ve created a mutually beneficial tool that’s accelerating nonprofits’ digital transformation while providing developer-friendly integrations for companies to tap into this unique and previously unavailable view of society. People of color will make up a majority of the American working class by 2032. Algorithms powering enterprises today are not designed to account for this seismic demographic shift,” said Phil Chow, CEO and co-founder of Humanitas.

Data aggregated and de-identified by Humanitas enables companies to utilize nuanced insight gathered from millions of public and partnered nonprofit sources via an API layer. With marketing use cases being the first implementations of these APIs, companies adopting Humanitas to implement into numerous marketing efforts will have more inclusive algorithms at their disposal, which will lead to better user engagement while reducing demographic bias.

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“Current enterprise algorithms lack a quantifiable and personalized DEI perspective that end-users expect,” said Aravindh Ravisankar, CTO and co-founder of Humanitas. “Building a sustainable data pipeline from frontline organizations is the first step towards bringing a ground-truth perspective to these algorithms.”

“The big picture is that Humanitas is building the data infrastructure to mainstream stakeholder capitalism,” said Jeff Walker, Chairman of New Profit. “I believe Humanitas’ unique approach will be the quantum leap to embed DEI directly into the core products and services across companies of all sizes.”

“We are committed to an operating model that can build a robust, scalable, and sustainable business that’s net-positive for everyone,” Chow added.